Strategic nuclear deterrence and the credible threats of tariffs

Twice a year, White Sands Missile Range allows visitors to tour the Trinity Test Site where the United States conducted the first ever detonation of a nuclear weapon in 1945 as part of the Manhattan Project. Last month, as I stood in the middle of the Jornada del Muerto Desert about 35 miles southeast of Socorro, New Mexico, my thoughts turned to my parents, my recent service in the Trump Administration, and the present debate over imposing tariffs on China.

My father joined the Navy in 1943. He was an orphaned Indian kid in Chickasha, Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl days of the Great Depression and by 1948 he became the first American Indian to fly a jet. In 1945, however, he was scheduled to fly amphibious air support for Operation Olympic, which was the planned World War II invasion of Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s main islands. Casualties among naval aviators were anticipated to be quite high.

When the first atomic bomb, “Little Boy,” was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, many in the Japanese high command either doubted that the first bomb was an atomic bomb or doubted that we had the capability of producing another one. They refused to surrender until we dropped the “Fat Man” over Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, the same design tested at Trinity. At that point, we were out of nukes, although General Leslie Groves would later write that “our entire organization both at Los Alamos and at Tinian was maintained in a state of complete readiness to prepare additional bombs.”

Whether we actually had additional nukes or not at the time, the Japanese feared we did. Their surrender demonstrated a core lesson of strategic deterrence: our adversary had to fear a credible threat that we would deploy devastating weapons, or as President Harry Truman put it, that we would create “a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.”

Thus, my father likely survived WWII in part because of an application of strategic deterrence. He later developed an aptitude for nuclear weapons theory and became a senior nuclear targeting strategist at NATO headquarters, where he would also meet my mother, a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst, who was writing a brief on the Chinese nuclear capability. As you might imagine, learning about strategic nuclear deterrence theory at the dinner table made for an interesting childhood.

So how does strategic nuclear deterrence influence my thinking about the present situation involving the Trump Administration’s threat to impose tariffs on China? Strategic deterrence is the use of threats by one party to convince another party either to refrain from initiating some course of action or to cease following a certain course of action. Since China is already involved in hostile actions towards the American economy, particularly regarding intellectual property, our goal is to get them to cease economic hostilities, much as our goal was to force Japan to cease military hostilities in 1945.

As I listened to President Trump’s new Director of the National Economic Council, Lawrence Kudlow, on Fox News Sunday recently, this notion of deterrence seems to be driving the Trump Administration’s trade policy towards China. Kudlow noted that while both he and President Trump are free traders, “you can't have free trade that is pro-growth around the world unless China brings down its barriers, opens up its markets, and stops this technology stealing that they're doing.”

I have always agreed with Kudlow that “tariff hikes are prosperity killers. They always have been and they always will be. Tariffs are taxes and the ones who suffer most are the users.” While Kudlow made clear that he remains opposed to blanket tariffs, as do I, he noted that even in the case of the “national security action, [the President has come to include] a lot of exceptions and a lot of carve-outs” for countries other than China.

This policy progression is consistent with what I learned during my time in the Trump Administration. The best approach is to take President Trump seriously, but always in the context of the broader negotiation on behalf of the American people. The President is a dealmaker at heart — it is a major reason he was elected — and I firmly believe that he is focused on the objective of forcing China to behave properly in the international trade arena and that his negotiation style is not constrained to feckless diplo-babble.

Of course, I do not mean to literally compare tariffs to nuclear weapons. There are few things on this planet worse than the prospect of a nuclear holocaust, and no tariff could ever cause the kind of widespread death and destruction of which even one mistakenly fired nuclear warhead is capable. The point I am making is that the economic might of the United States is so great that the credible threat of tariffs (and, to an extent, the imposition of tariffs) can force China’s hand, much in the way that our nuclear arsenal (both real and perceived) forced the hand of the Japanese in the 1940s.

Like Kudlow, I have always been a hard-liner on China, and while neither of us likes tariffs, “sometimes there is no substitution for putting tariffs into the discussion, into the process. That is part of the quiver of arrows that the president has.” So, while I oppose the imposition of broad tariffs, I support President Trump’s willingness to advance a credible threat, making clear that China must change its international trade policies or face substantial consequences.

Given the negotiating success that President Trump has had throughout his time in office, I am confident that we will avert a trade war with China and prompt them to be a responsible participant in an international free-trade marketplace. Such success, however, requires that we not unilaterally disarm. Strategic deterrence only works if one’s adversary fears a deployment of devastating weaponry.

Dr. Gavin Clarkson is a Republican candidate for the 2nd Congressional District of New Mexico.